To go to the next: http://thatblessedhope.ucoz.com/index/0-35

A SUDDEN CHANGE

Professor James, in his lectures at Manchester, treats the teaching of the Bible as being now so utterly discredited and out of date as to call for only a brief, passing reference in a discussion purporting to deal with "the present situation in philosophy." He says:

"I shall leave cynical materialism entirely out of our discussion as not calling for treatment before this present audience, and I shall ignore old-fashioned dualistic theism for the same reason" (page 30).

ITS SIGNIFICANCE

Let the reader not fail to grasp the significance of the statement. For hundreds of years the instruction imparted to the youths of England and America has been grounded upon the Scriptures as the oracles of God; and, in fact, the work of teaching has been carried on mainly by ministers of the Word. The positions which England and America have gained among the nations during those centuries is known to every one. God has greatly blessed them with national prosperity and world-wide dominion.

But now, we are told (and it is true), that within a single generation the framework of our educational systems has been so changed that the language which expressed the abiding convictions of our ancestors sounds as strange in the atmosphere of our great universities as the language of a "different race of men," uttering the formulas of some "outlandish savage religion." Whether the change is for the better or for the worse is not, for the moment, in question. What we wish to impress upon our readers’ minds at this point is simply the fact that a tremendous change has taken place, with amazing suddenness, and in regard to matters that are of vital importance to the whole world, and particularly to the English-speaking people.

EFFECT UPON PLASTIC MINDS

The effect upon the plastic minds of undergraduates of such words as those last quoted can easily be imagined. They artfully convey the suggestion that these young men are, in respect of their philosophical notions, vastly superior to the men of light and learning of past generations, and that it is by the repudiation of Christianity and its "lively oracles" that they furnish convincing proof of their intellectual superiority. There are few minds among men of the age here addressed, or of any age except they be firmly grounded and established in the truth — which could resist the insidious influence of such an appeal to the innate vanity of men.

Such being then the influences to which the students at our universities are now exposed, is there not urgent need of impressing upon Christian parents (there are yet a few remaining) the warning of our text, and exhorting them to beware lest their children be despoiled through philosophy and empty deceit?

A GREAT PERIL

What does this sudden and stupendous change portend? Is not the very existence of Christianized civilization (i.e., the social system which has been reared under the influence and protection of Christianity) imperiled by it? Beyond all doubt it is. Nor is our reasonable apprehension in this regard in any wise allayed by Professor James’ statements that the principal factors of this change are "scientific evolutionism" and "the rising tide of social democratic ideals." Great is the mischief already accomplished by these mighty agencies of evil, and we are as yet but at the beginning of their destructive career.

One more word Professor James speaks on this point: "An external creator and his institutions may still be verbally confessed at Church in formulas that linger by their mere inertia, but the life is out of them" (page 34).

And with this agree the words of the risen Christ to the church in its Sardis stage,

"Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead. Be watchful, and strengthen the things that remain that are ready to die" Revelation 3:1,2.

BUDDHA OR CHRIST?

It is now in order to inspect briefly that system of philosophy which, in its several forms, has crowded out of our universities the doctrine of Christ (and which has incidentally made Him a liar). We have already stated that this reigning system, now holding almost undisputed sway in "Christian" England and America, is pantheism, which has flourished for thousands of years as the philosophical religious cult of India. We have seen how Professor James defers to the Hindu estimate of the Bible doctrine of creation, and sides with it. If the test of a doctrine is the way it is regarded by the Hindu's, it is quite logical to go to them for the interpretation of the universe which is to be taught at our schools and colleges.

The philosophers of today have, therefore, nothing to offer to us that our ancestors did not understand as well as they, and that they were not as free to choose as we are. Did our ancestors then prefer the worse thing to the better when they chose, and founded great universities to preserve, the doctrines taught by Jesus Christ and His Apostles, rather than (as they might have done) the doctrines associated with the name of Buddha? Our present-day teachers of philosophy appear to say so. But if there remains any judgment at all in the twentieth-century man, he will remember, before lightly acquiescing in the removal of the ancient foundations, that whatever there may be of superiority in the social order of Christianized England and America over that of pantheistic India is due to the choice which our forefathers made when they accepted the teaching of the Gospel of Christ, and to the fact that every subsequent generation until the present has ratified and adhered firmly to that choice.

WHAT BENEFIT?

What benefit, then, can any sane man expect as the result of this sudden and wholesale repudiation of teachings which are vital to Christianity, and the acceptance in their stead of the ancient doctrines of heathendom?

Surely there never was a generation of men so unwise, so blinded by its own conceit, as this foolish generation, in thus casting away the guidance of that Book which has put England and America at the head of the nations, and which has been the source of everything that is commendable in so-called "civilized society," and in accepting in its place the brutalizing and degrading doctrines of pantheism.

In whatever our eyes can rest upon with satisfaction in our past history or our present institutions, our art, literature, ethics, standards of family life and national life, etc., etc., we see the evidences of the influence of those teachings which have now been discarded by the wise men of our day as "puerile" in comparison with those of heathen philosophy. How long will it be before the righteous judgment of God overtakes the peoples who have thus turned with contempt from the source of all their greatness?

The warning, therefore, should be sounded out, not only to the young men and women who are likely to be the dire? victims of the "higher education" of the day, but to every dweller in civilized lands, to Beware lest any man make a prey of them through philosophy and vain deceit. For the matter we are considering vitally affects the interests of every civilized community.

NATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY

From the Bible and from secular history we learn that God deals not only with individuals on the ground of privilege and responsibility, but with nations also. Because of the extraordinary privileges granted to the Israelites, a heavier responsibility rested upon them than upon other nations, and they were visited for their unfaithfulness with corresponding severity. And now we are living in that long stretch of centuries known as "the times of the Gentiles," during which the natural branches of the olive tree (Israel) are broken off, and the branches of the wild olive tree are grafted into their place; that is to say, the period wherein the Gentiles are occupying temporarily Israel’s place of special privilege and responsibility. The diminishing of them has become the riches of the Gentiles Romans 11:11-25.

In dealing with a nation God looks to its rulers or leaders as responsible for its actions. The justice of this is specially evident in countries where the people choose their own rulers and governors. In our day the people are all-powerful. Rulers are chosen for the express purpose of executing the popular will. Likewise also the time has come when the people not only elect their rulers, but also heap to themselves teachers, because they will not endure sound doctrine 2 Timothy 4:3,4. We may be sure, then, that the persons we find in the professional chairs of our colleges are there by the mandate of the people, who have turned away their ears from the truth and give heed to fables which please their itching ears.

By the very constitution of a democratic social order the teachers must teach what the people like to hear, or else give place to those who will. God will surely judge the privileged nations for this. The change has been great and sudden. The judgment will be swift and severe. Until our day, whatever may have been the moral state of the masses of people of England and America, governments were established on the foundations of Christian doctrine; kings and other rulers were sworn to defend the faith; the Bible was taught in the schools; and no one was regarded as fit for a position of public responsibility who was not a professed follower of Jesus Christ. As for the teachers in our schools and colleges, not one could have been found who did not hold and teach as the unchanging truth of God the doctrines of Bible Christianity.

A GREAT APOSTASY

Recognizing these facts, which all must admit to be facts, however much they may differ as to the significance of them, it follows that we are living under the dark shadow of the greatest national apostasy that has ever taken place. During all the history of mankind there has never been such a wholesale turning away from the Source of national blessings, in order to take up with the gods of the heathen.

SOLEMN NONSENSE

We have already stated that the regnant philosophy, i.e., pantheism, is expounded in our universities in two forms, known respectively as "monism" and "pluralism." Professor James, although a vigorous critic of monism, admits that the latter has almost complete possession of the field, and that his own cult of "pluralism" has very few adherents. These two species of pantheism are, however, alike in the essential matter that "both identify human substance with divine substance." From a Christian standpoint, therefore, it is not very important to distinguish between them.

The principal difference is that monism (or "absolutism") "thinks that said substance becomes fully divine only in the form of totality, and is not its real self in any form but the all-form"; whereas pluralism maintains "that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected ......and that a distributive form of reality, the each-form, is logically as acceptable, and empirically as probable, as the all-form" (page 34). "For monism the world is no collection, but one great all-inclusive fact, outside of which there is nothing;" "And when the monism is idealistic, this all-enveloping fact is represented as an absolute mind that makes the partial facts by thinking them, just as we make objects in a dream by dreaming them, or personages in a story by imagining them."

"The world and the all-thinker thus co-penetrate and soak each other up without residuum." "The absolute makes us by thinking us." "The absolute and the world are one fact." "This is the full pantheistic scheme, the immanence of God in His creation, a conception sublime from its tremendous unity." On the other hand, pluralism says that "reality may exist in a distributive form in the shape not of an all, but of a set of eaches." "There is this in favor of the eaches, that they are at any rate real enough to have made themselves at least appear to every one, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately to only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously" (page 129).

I have transcribed the foregoing specimens of this solemn nonsense in order that the reader may be informed of the choice which our great universities now set before the thousands of eager and receptive minds that throng them in quest of knowledge. The rulers of these educational institutions virtually say to their students, You must accept a pantheistic conception of the universe, but you may choose between a monistic universe and a pluralistic universe between a universe which consists of a single ponderous "All," or one comprising an indefinite number of miscellaneous "Eaches."

CONFLICTING SCHOOLS

Whichever of these "weak and beggarly" conceptions our young student adopts, he must be prepared to hear it assailed by the adherents of the rival school and criticized as highly irrational and absurd; and for this his course in philosophy prepares him. Thus the advocates of monism declare that pluralism is "infected and undermined by self-contradiction." On the other hand, Professor James maintains that the "absolute" of the monist "involves features of irrationality peculiar to itself." He points out that, upon the theory of absolute idealism, the all-knower must know, and be always distinctly conscious relation of every object in the whole universe, but also all that the object is not as that a "table is not a chair, not a rhinoceros, not a logarithm, not a mile away from the door, not worth five hundred pounds sterling, not a thousand centuries old," etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam. "Furthermore, if it be a fact that certain ideas are silly, the absolute has to have already thought the silly ideas to establish them in silliness. The rubbish in its mind would thus appear easily to outweigh in amount the more desirable material. One would expect it fairly to burst with such an obesity, plethora, and superfoetation of useless information" (page 128). And how about things that are criminal, vicious, and impure? These are of necessity just as much the thought-forms of the absolute as their opposites.

A PHILOSOPHER’S VERDICT

Again, after mentioning certain difficulties of the idealist theory, Professor James speaks disparagingly of "the oddity of inventing as a remedy for the inconveniences resulting from this situation a supernumerary conceptual object called an ‘absolute,’ into which you pack the self-same contradictions unreduced" (page 271).

Once more we quote: "When I read transcendentalist literature .....I get nothing but a sort of marking of time, champing of jaws, pawing of the ground, and resettling into the same attitude, like a weary horse in a stall with an empty manger. It is but a turning over the same threadbare categories, bringing the same objections, and urging the same answers and solutions, with never a new fact or new horizon coming into sight" (page 265).

This is what a philosopher of the front ranks says of the ruling philosophy of the day, whose speculations are being impressed upon the minds of our brightest college students. One comment may be permitted, namely, that if a foolish absolute did not Create men by thinking them, certainly foolish men have created an absolute by thinking it; and it is difficult to conceive how they could have employed their minds more foolishly.

AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK

This is the situation brought about, now that Christianity has been politely bowed out of our schools and seminaries in order to make room for the irrational philosophy of Hinduism! Very pertinent in this connection are the words of the prophet:

"The wise men are ashamed; they are dismayed and taken. Lo, they have rejected the Word of the Lord, and what wisdom is in them?" Jeremiah 8:9.

For the occupation in which our philosophers are engaged is the impossible task of trying to establish an explanation of the visible universe after having rejected the true account thereof received from its Creator. The god of the ruling philosophy is one who is not permitted to speak or make himself known in any way. Philosophy must needs put these restraints upon him for its own protection; for, should he break through them, the occupation of the philosopher would be gone. So he must remain in impenetrable obscurity, speaking no word, and making no intelligible sign or motion, in order that philosophers may continue their congenial business of making bad guesses at what he is like.

Go to the next: http://thatblessedhope.ucoz.com/index/0-37